Interviews

Halo 2: Setting the Mood

There was a real delicate balance, like this one song "Never Surrender," made it in because I wanted a kind of dance song in there. I wanted something that they could play in the club, because there's a lot of club kids who'd love to go out dancing, with the thumping bass and four on the floor, and say "F**k! That's Halo!" I just wanted to have one cut that was like that, because it really wasn't represented.

There really wasn't a lot of pushback from Bungie, since they're really protective of their product, and I can't blame them, you know? So I said, "Look guys, if I was just sitting there in the club talking to some girl, and I suddenly heard some heavy bass and chanting monks, I'd think, damn, that's Halo!" So I just wanted one cut like that, and I told them that they could throw me to the sharks. I've swum upstream my whole life, so I can take the heat.

GameSpy: Yeah, I actually remember when I saw the list of who was going to be on the soundtrack, I got pretty worried. I figured that they'd just grab an album track and slap it over the game. But then when I played the game, I noticed that it was pretty seamless. There was never a moment when I thought, "Oh, man, I know who that is." At the end of the game, though, I found myself wondering who did specific parts.

Nile Rodgers: Well, go on some of the chat rooms and tell those guys, because they have it all wrong. If you think this s**t is Grand Theft Auto, you got it all wrong. Don't get me wrong, Grand Theft Auto's got some great tracks, but my point is that there's a place for that. I mean, all of that Tony Hawk's Underground shit I love, there's some balls to the wall, slammin' tracks. I love that stuff, but it's just not Halo.

You gotta understand that what winds up happening is that MTV will end up covering something, and they don't care about the process, they just care about the names. That's the business they're in. I like to call it the People Magazine business. "Oh wow, you got Hoobastank, man, tell us what they did!" It's that type of s**t, and we gotta do that, because we want people to know about it. But that's really not fair to the quality of composition that these guys did, and it's not fair to the fact that they have to do it twice. They have to musically work the score, then they have to put a pop song on top of it, which was my requirement.

I mean, as a record label, I had to say to myself, "Nobody's gonna play this s**t anyway, so at least give me a chance to get it played." It's like, could you imagine some radio station trying to play the fourth movement of that huge Incubus song? They'd come and kill me! They'd firebomb my house if I tried to bring that to a radio station. But the point is, it's Halo, it's by artists who were inspired by playing the game. The thing is, musicians don't write in a vacuum, their compositions are things that happen over time.